NEW YORK – 6/24/2014 - After obtaining and analyzing thousands of documents from police departments around the country, oday the American Civil Liberties Union released the report War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing. The ACLU focused on more than 800 SWAT raids conducted by law enforcement agencies in 20 states and on the agencies’ acquisition of military weaponry, vehicles, and equipment.
"We found that police overwhelmingly use SWAT raids not for extreme emergencies like hostage situations but to carry out such basic police work as serving warrants or searching for a small amount of drugs," said Kara Dansky, Senior Counsel with the ACLU’s Center for Justice. "Carried out by ten or more officers armed with assault rifles, flashbang grenades, and battering rams, these paramilitary raids disproportionately impacted people of color, sending the clear message that the families being raided are the enemy. This unnecessary violence causes property damage, injury, and death."
The report documents multiple tragedies caused by police carrying out needless SWAT raids, including a 26-year-old mother shot with her child in her arms and a 19-month-old baby critically injured when a flashbang grenade landed in his crib.
"Our police are trampling on our civil rights and turning communities of color into war zones," Dansky continued. "We all pay for it with our tax dollars. The Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice give police military weaponry and vehicles as well as grants for military equipment. The War on Drugs has failed, yet the federal government hasn’t stopped the flow of guns and money."
The report calls for the federal government to rein in the incentives for police to militarize. The ACLU also asks that local, state, and federal governments track the use of SWAT and the guns, tanks, and other military equipment that end up in police hands.
"Our findings reveal not only the dangers of militarized police, but also the difficulties in determining the extent and impact of those dangers. At every level – from the police to the state governments to the federal government – there is almost no record keeping about SWAT or the use of military weapons and vehicles by local law enforcement," Dansky noted.
In addition, the report recommends that state legislatures and municipalities develop criteria for SWAT raids that limit their deployment to the kinds of emergencies for which they were intended, such as an active shooter situation.
The report is available here: www.aclu.org/militarization
Source: American Civil Liberties Union
Showing posts with label security. Show all posts
Showing posts with label security. Show all posts
Court strikes down 'No Fly List' procedures
(ACLU) - 6/24/2014 - In a landmark ruling, a federal judge struck down as unconstitutional the government’s procedures for people on the No Fly List to challenge their inclusion. The decision came in an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit brought on behalf of 13 Americans who found themselves on the list without any notice, reasons, or meaningful way to get off it.
The judge ordered the government to create a new process that remedies these shortcomings, calling the current process “wholly ineffective” and a violation of the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process. The ruling also granted a key request in the lawsuit, ordering the government to tell the ACLU’s clients why they are on the No Fly List and give them the opportunity to challenge their inclusion on the list before the judge.
“For years, in the name of national security the government has argued for blanket secrecy and judicial deference to its profoundly unfair No Fly List procedures, and those arguments have now been resoundingly rejected by the court,” said ACLU National Security Project Director Hina Shamsi, one of the attorneys who argued the case.
“Our clients will finally get the due process to which they are entitled under the Constitution. This excellent decision also benefits other people wrongly stuck on the No Fly List, with the promise of a way out from a Kafkaesque bureaucracy causing them no end of grief and hardship. We hope this serves as a wake-up call for the government to fix its broken watchlist system, which has swept up so many innocent people.”
According to media reports, there are more than 20,000 people on the No Fly List. Their only recourse is to file a request with the Department of Homeland Security's Traveler Redress Inquiry Program (DHS TRIP), after which DHS responds with a letter that does not explain why they were denied boarding. The letter does not confirm or deny whether their names remain on the list, and does not indicate whether they can fly.
The ruling from the U.S. District Court in Oregon found, “[W]ithout proper notice and an opportunity to be heard, an individual could be doomed to indefinite placement on the No-Fly List. … [T]he absence of any meaningful procedures to afford Plaintiffs the opportunity to contest their placement on the No-Fly List violates Plaintiffs’ rights to procedural due process.”
One of the plaintiffs in the case is Sheikh Mohamed Abdirahman Kariye, who is the imam of Portland’s largest Mosque.
“Finally I will be able to challenge whatever incorrect information the government has been using to stigmatize me and keep me from flying,” Imam Kariye said. “I have been prevented by the government from traveling to visit my family members and fulfill religious obligations for years, and it has had a devastating impact on all of us. After all this time, I look forward to a fair process that allows me to clear my name in court.”
The national ACLU, along with its affiliates in Oregon, Southern California, Northern California, and New Mexico, filed the lawsuit in June 2010 on behalf of 13 U.S. citizens, including four military veterans. In July 2012, the 9th Circuit Appeals Court reversed the district court's dismissal of the case on jurisdictional grounds, allowing the district court to consider the case on its merits. In August 2013, the court found that constitutional rights are at stake when the government places Americans on the list.
Source: American Civil Liberties Union
The judge ordered the government to create a new process that remedies these shortcomings, calling the current process “wholly ineffective” and a violation of the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process. The ruling also granted a key request in the lawsuit, ordering the government to tell the ACLU’s clients why they are on the No Fly List and give them the opportunity to challenge their inclusion on the list before the judge.
“For years, in the name of national security the government has argued for blanket secrecy and judicial deference to its profoundly unfair No Fly List procedures, and those arguments have now been resoundingly rejected by the court,” said ACLU National Security Project Director Hina Shamsi, one of the attorneys who argued the case.
“Our clients will finally get the due process to which they are entitled under the Constitution. This excellent decision also benefits other people wrongly stuck on the No Fly List, with the promise of a way out from a Kafkaesque bureaucracy causing them no end of grief and hardship. We hope this serves as a wake-up call for the government to fix its broken watchlist system, which has swept up so many innocent people.”
According to media reports, there are more than 20,000 people on the No Fly List. Their only recourse is to file a request with the Department of Homeland Security's Traveler Redress Inquiry Program (DHS TRIP), after which DHS responds with a letter that does not explain why they were denied boarding. The letter does not confirm or deny whether their names remain on the list, and does not indicate whether they can fly.
The ruling from the U.S. District Court in Oregon found, “[W]ithout proper notice and an opportunity to be heard, an individual could be doomed to indefinite placement on the No-Fly List. … [T]he absence of any meaningful procedures to afford Plaintiffs the opportunity to contest their placement on the No-Fly List violates Plaintiffs’ rights to procedural due process.”
One of the plaintiffs in the case is Sheikh Mohamed Abdirahman Kariye, who is the imam of Portland’s largest Mosque.
“Finally I will be able to challenge whatever incorrect information the government has been using to stigmatize me and keep me from flying,” Imam Kariye said. “I have been prevented by the government from traveling to visit my family members and fulfill religious obligations for years, and it has had a devastating impact on all of us. After all this time, I look forward to a fair process that allows me to clear my name in court.”
The national ACLU, along with its affiliates in Oregon, Southern California, Northern California, and New Mexico, filed the lawsuit in June 2010 on behalf of 13 U.S. citizens, including four military veterans. In July 2012, the 9th Circuit Appeals Court reversed the district court's dismissal of the case on jurisdictional grounds, allowing the district court to consider the case on its merits. In August 2013, the court found that constitutional rights are at stake when the government places Americans on the list.
Source: American Civil Liberties Union
Domestic Surveillance Practices Are Indefensible
By Steve Rensberry
Commentary
--------------------------------------------------------
Irrespective of the government's stated intent that it means us no harm and that they are only seeking to protect us from terrorism, the mass surveillance and collection of an entire population's Internet communications and phone records--and who knows what else--is deeply damaging to the body politic.
The goal, it would seem, is not merely to apprehend criminals and punish them when others are hurt, but to predict the behavior of all of us through an analysis of both our behavior and thoughts -- gleaned from the words we use and the things we share and derived from digital algorithms and selected criteria hatched behind guarded doors and the walls of secretive agencies. There is nothing inherently wrong with taking reasonable steps to prevent crime, but what is freedom worth without the basic right to free and open communication? Digital communication is all but ubiquitous in a modern society.
The government, and the National Security Agency in particular, has no justifiable reason in digging for data on innocent Americans, or in collecting metadata that contains details of who people talk to, what they read and what they do in the digital world. Certainly the objective of fighting terrorism can be accomplished with far less intrusive means, that respects our privacy.
What we now know is that every email you send to your relatives, every phone call you make and receive, every business dealing, financial transaction and text message that you make using electronic communication, will now be analyzed, scanned, profiled and stored indefinitely for easy access by agents snooping for dirt.
Who will be watching the watchers?
It is not Google the search engine you will be using to search the Internet. It is, for all practical purposes, a government search engine. The same can be said for Yahoo, Microsoft's Bing, Facebook and all the rest of today's Internet giants who are now routinely ordered to hand over records containing some of the most personal electronics transactions we make.
Entrusting our data with private-sector corporations is one thing. Having it collected and stored by powerful government agencies as though we were common criminals who need constant surveillance is another thing entirely.
David Rosen, writing about "6 Government Survillance Programs Designed to Watch What You Do Online," noted in June of 2012 the growing list of methods by which the U.S. government tracks, without probably cause, the behavior and habits of its own civilians. These include a procedure by the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property section to gather data from social networking sites in order to "establish motives and personal relationships"; the IRS practice of using sites such as Facebook and Google to investigate taxpayers; an effort by the Director of National Intelligence to obtain a mechanism to "integrate all online information,"; a Defense Department effort involving a "Social Media Strategic Communications (SMISC) program; and an FBI effort to develop an "FBI Social Media Application," program.
Add to these a long list of other government surveillance projects such as the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative; PRISM; DCSNet: Main Core: NSA Call Database; Intelligence Community (IC); Financial Crimes Enforcement Task Force: Terrorist Finance Tracking Program; Tailored Access Operations and Boundless Informant .
A June 15, 2013 story by the Associated Press entitled "PRISM part of a much larger government surveillance program," cites a program called US-98XN which predates the PRISM program and which it says has been collecting data on U.S. citizens from private sector companies for years.
Entrusting our data with private-sector corporations is one thing. Having it collected and stored by powerful government agencies as though we were common criminals who need constant surveillance is another thing entirely.
David Rosen, writing about "6 Government Survillance Programs Designed to Watch What You Do Online," noted in June of 2012 the growing list of methods by which the U.S. government tracks, without probably cause, the behavior and habits of its own civilians. These include a procedure by the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property section to gather data from social networking sites in order to "establish motives and personal relationships"; the IRS practice of using sites such as Facebook and Google to investigate taxpayers; an effort by the Director of National Intelligence to obtain a mechanism to "integrate all online information,"; a Defense Department effort involving a "Social Media Strategic Communications (SMISC) program; and an FBI effort to develop an "FBI Social Media Application," program.
Add to these a long list of other government surveillance projects such as the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative; PRISM; DCSNet: Main Core: NSA Call Database; Intelligence Community (IC); Financial Crimes Enforcement Task Force: Terrorist Finance Tracking Program; Tailored Access Operations and Boundless Informant .
A June 15, 2013 story by the Associated Press entitled "PRISM part of a much larger government surveillance program," cites a program called US-98XN which predates the PRISM program and which it says has been collecting data on U.S. citizens from private sector companies for years.
Other past efforts have included Project Echelon, the Total Information Awareness System, the COINTELPRO program and Spygate.
Computer and digital technology has provided us with tremendous freedom to express our ideas and to communicate, all at speeds that would have been unimaginable just 20 years ago. We can send, receive and store practically an endless number of photos, documents and messages.
But it's a freedom that clearly has become a two-edged sword.
It's sad and unfortunate, but the days of deep encryption, digital privacy fences, multiple aliases and the serious mistrust of everything we see and hear, appear poised to grow exponentially.
Unless things change, the days of a free and open Internet, of corporations that can be trusted to safeguard our data for an exchange of services and revenue, would appear all but dead. (Edited with corrections, July 5, 2013)
Computer and digital technology has provided us with tremendous freedom to express our ideas and to communicate, all at speeds that would have been unimaginable just 20 years ago. We can send, receive and store practically an endless number of photos, documents and messages.
But it's a freedom that clearly has become a two-edged sword.
It's sad and unfortunate, but the days of deep encryption, digital privacy fences, multiple aliases and the serious mistrust of everything we see and hear, appear poised to grow exponentially.
Unless things change, the days of a free and open Internet, of corporations that can be trusted to safeguard our data for an exchange of services and revenue, would appear all but dead. (Edited with corrections, July 5, 2013)
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